History of Logic Programming
The history of Logic Programming has been a controversial topic (see Carl Hewitt’s Censorship and Harassment by the Wikipedia). The term “Logic Programming” was popularized by Robert Kowalski beginning in the 1970’s. However, he never provided an adequate definition. I proposed that Logic Programming be characterized as “the logical deduction of computational steps“. Using this characterization, my colleagues and I were able to prove that Logic Programming is not computationally universal. In other words, there are some concurrent computations that cannot be implemented using Logic Programming.
Logic Programming was used as the foundation of the Japanese Fifth Generation Computing Project (ICOT) and was a principle cause of the failure of the project.
A historical account of the above events can be found in the article History of Logic Programming that was censored from the Wikipedia at the instigation of Kowalski.
